Patrick Heron

A leading figure in twentieth-century British art, Patrick Heron has played a major role in the development of post-war abstract art. However, much of his work also reflects the influence of the extraordinary light, colour, shapes and textures to be found in the garden and landscape surrounding his house in Cornwall. He has vigorously pursued the ideal of an art of pure visual sensation. As far back as 1962 he explicitly claimed that 'colour is both the subject and the means, the form and the content, the image and the meaning, in my painting today'. In this catalogue, published to accompany the major retrospective at the Tate Gallery, over seventy paintings by the artist are reproduced as colour plates. These works range from small oils to enormous canvases. Selected by David Sylvester, the curator of the exhibition, they trace the developments in Heron's style over sixty years.